Storm FX Blog

Stay on top of what happening in your field. We’ve created a single point for regularly updated articles, resources, industry news and other stuff we find interesting. If there is a topic you would like to see an article on or a general question you would like answered, please let us know and we’ll see what we can do. Otherwise, enjoy!

Early Adopters of New CG Lighting and Rendering Software Lend Their Support as Bakery Relight Heads for 16th Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Interactive Media

The Bakery, the 3D computer graphics software company, recently showcased Bakery Relight™, their game-changing animation and visual effects lighting and rendering solution at FMX 2011, at the Haus der Wirtschaft in Stuttgart, Germany. The software, which launched at NAB 2011 in Las Vegas in April has quickly garnered plaudits and strong support from early adopters, and is already making its mark at production facilities internationally.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - May 24, 2011) - Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for awesome games and interactive 3D on the web, iOS, Android, consoles and beyond, today announced that its registered user base has doubled to more than 500,000 users in just over 6 months; 150,000 of these users are active monthly users representing well over a million hours of game development every month. In addition, installs of the free Unity browser plugin for playing web games have surpassed 60 million.

In 2003 and long before the introduction of Facebook and the iPhone, co-founders David Helgason (CEO), Nicholas Francis (Chief Creative Officer) and Joachim Ante (Chief Technology Officer) had the vision of democratizing game development and enabling everyone to create rich interactive 3D.

They took the very complex and expensive technology required for modern, cross-platform video game development and built a powerful, intuitive suite of tools with smooth and efficient workflows around it. The end result: the Unity development platform. A major feature of Unity is "Author Once, Deploy Anywhere" support for every major gaming platform so that developers can reach huge audiences for their games with great speed and flexibility.

"The combination of Unity's powerful yet approachable technology has resulted in it being the #1 game engine used for both traditional and casual games," said David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. "It's exciting to see how our users build on top of Unity to create mind blowing innovation of their own."

Unity is the most widely-used middleware in games for the Apple iOS App Store. More than 1500 Unity games are in the App Store today with many having made "best of" and "top selling" lists like Battleheart, Gears, Samurai II, Skee-Ball and Snuggle Truck. Unity also powers mobile training apps like Launcher Dogs for the US Military. Unity for Android was generally available in March of this year, and there already more than 100 Android games on the market with many getting rave reviews.

Unity also supports all the major gaming consoles -- Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation. Rochard, the first Unity-powered Sony PlayStation game, is scheduled for release this year.

Unity Technologies continues to seek out new ways to radically democratize the entire game industry. In 2010, the company introduced the Unity Asset Store, a digital marketplace where developers can share and sell assets to accelerate development. The Unity Asset Store catalog has grown to more than 630 ready-to-use packages, with some top-sellers earning more than $15,000 per month.

Unity Technologies also introduced Union, a business unit dedicated to distributing high quality 3D games on mobile phones, tablets, set-top boxes, connected TVs and other new platforms. More than 1000 developers representing more than 1000 Unity-authored titles have registered with Union. Union recently announced a partnership with Sony Ericsson to enable rapid development and porting of Unity-based games to the new Sony Ericsson Xperia™ PLAY smartphone and a partnership with RIM to bring dozens of Unity-based games to the PlayBook.

Storm FX is very excited to announce that as an exclusive part of our partnership with Unity Technologies, Carl Callewaert, lead Unity Evangelist, will be making the trek from Canada to visit our shores.

Want a one on one meeting with Carl?

Arriving in late June (dates TBA) for only a few days, Carl and Storm FX will be touring Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide. Please contact Storm FX on 1300 061 007 or email
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if you would like a one on one meeting with Carl.

About Carl Callewaert

Carl has 10 years experience working in motion capture, 3d animation, game development, sales and education around the world. His professional experience includes working as a liaison between artists, programmers and sales department on software/hardware development, motion capture pipelines and (mobile) game development.

As an Autodesk Certified Instructor and Unity expert, Carl has taught specialized courses and workshops on game engines, key framing, motion capture, photo-realistic rendering, visual effects, modeling, level editing at companies and education institutes. Currently, Carl is Unity evangelist at the award winning company Unity Technologies . He also runs Fundi 3D where he is involved in the production of games. At The Gaming and Animation Institute of Fredericton Carl overviews the 3D gaming programs and runs the eMentorship program.

For his 3D gaming and training work Carl received an Medial of “Recognition of Excellence Service" by Royal Canadian Artillery School.

About Unity

Unity Technologies is revolutionizing the game industry with Unity, its award-winning breakthrough development platform. Unity Technologies has more than 500,000 registered users worldwide -- including Bigpoint, Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola, Disney, Electronic Arts, LEGO, Microsoft, NASA, Nickelodeon, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., large and small studios, indies, students and hobbyists -- all using Unity to create games and interactive 3D, like training simulations and medical and architectural visualizations, on the web, mobile, consoles and beyond. Unity Technologies is aggressively innovating to expand usability, power and platform reach along with its Asset Store digital content marketplace and Union game distribution service so that it can deliver on its vision of democratizing interactive 3D technology. Unity Technologies is headquartered in San Francisco and has development offices worldwide.

Evermotion have just announced the release of their latest tutorial, San Juan Video Tutorial PREORDER.

Learn how Daniel Schmid has created an award winning 3D art - San Juan. This tutorial is splited into 9 chapters with fully narrated video in both english and spanish language version. This tutorial is covering the whole creation process from start to finish covering the following topics: inspiration, layout, modeling, dynamics vrayproxy, shading, lighting and postproduction.

Visit your Projects in Real-Time with Accurately Simulated Lighting

LumenRT is our revolutionary new product for the visualization of architectural projects in real-time 3D with photo-real illumination.

Thanks to LumenRT, architects no longer have to choose between high-quality images and real-time visualization: They can walk or fly through their designs and experience the true quality of light in fully interactive 3D!

LumenRT Review for SketchUp works with both the free and the Pro versions of SketchUp.

For more information or to get a quote, contact Storm FX on 1300 061 007 or email
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Pixar has just announced the release of RenderMan Pro Server 16.0. All customers who are on current maintenance are automatically entitled to a free upgrade to this release. Please contact our sales team at
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or 1300 061 007 to request an updated license. After upgrading you will receive a new serial number tied to your existing license server and download access will be given.

If your RenderMan licenses are not on current maintenance, upgrade pricing is available. Please contact Storm FX for assistance with your upgrade.

RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 is a major release and an important milestone for Pixar's core rendering technology. Important innovations, enhancements, and performance gains include:

Fundamental advancements in RenderMan's ray-tracing technology, including a new ray-tracing hider, a radiosity cache, and physically plausible shading, all allowing RenderMan to take full advantage of the ever increasing processing power of multi-core architectures while providing the tools to implement these new features with efficiency and elegance.

RenderMan's new progressive ray tracing now provides interactive re-rendering for production shading and lighting.

New deep compositing features invaluable for post production while continuing to advance Pixar's point-based rendering technology with full support for spherical harmonics, enhanced threading scalability, all with greatly accelerated performance.

Vector textures, major enhancements to realistic motion blur, and much more. A full set of release notes is available from our RenderMan Support Forum.